Vol. XV, Spring 2003

By Duke Economics in Uncategorized on August 2, 2003.

This volume is the fifteenth annual publication of the Duke Journal of Economics. The Journal is a showcase for outstanding research in economics by Duke undergraduates. We dedicate this issue to Professor Jack Blackburn. Jack led the Duke Economics Department as Chair and Duke University as Provost and Chancellor. Since retiring from Duke he has written two books on energy and natural resources. We are grateful to him for his wisdom, energy and warmth.

Our former colleague, Professor Emeritus Tom Naylor, sends his “congratulations and best wishes to Jack Blackburn – a first rate economist, an excellent teacher, a gentleman and a scholar, a conscientious environmentalist, and a compassionate citizen of Duke, Durham and the planet earth.”

Professors Roy Weintraub, Allen Kelley, and William Yohe wrote reflections on Professor Blackburn.

I wish to add my gratitude for help from Jack when I was Treasurer of the Carolina Friends School in Durham and Jack was a member of the board. Thanks also to Professors Allen Kelley, Roy Weintraub and Bill Yohe for their recollections of Jack.

We congratulate the authors of the papers presented in this issue. Many of these papers are undergraduate honors theses. Several of our undergraduates and graduate students have begun to publish their research and deserve congratulations.

Justin Bledin and Sharon Shewmake, Duke BA 2002, have received a revise and resubmit from the Journal of Economic Methodology on an article titled “Research Programmes and Model Building: Reassessing the Leontief Paradox,” which builds on their joint 2002 honors thesis.

Seth J. Wechsler, Duke BA 2001 and MA 2003, will publish his masters’ thesis “A Malthusian Take on Government Intervention in Fertility Decisions” in the September 2003 issue of the International Review of Economics and Business.

Five students wrote book reviews in the spring of 2003, that have been scheduled for publication in scholarly journals. We are delighted that their critical skills are being appreciated by the profession.

Richard Griffin, Review of Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger’s The Economics of the World Trading System, MIT Press, 2002, forthcoming in Kyklos.

Pia Jean Kristiansen. Review of Noreena Hertz’s The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, Arrow Books, 2001, forthcoming in Development and Change.

Fernando Lohmann, Review of Sara Schoonmaker’s U.S.-Brazilian Conflicts in the Global Economy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002, forthcoming in The Journal of International Trade and Economic Development.

Chad Nicholson, Review of Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Doubleday, 2003, forthcoming in Development and Change.

Liane Schubert, Review of Daniel Litvin’s Empires of Profit: Commerce, Conquest and Corporate Responsibility, Texere, 2003, forthcoming in Kyklos.

Kristiansen earned her B.A. in economics from Duke in May 2003. Griffin and Nicholson are earning their J.D. degrees and their master’s degrees in economics from Duke.

Lohmann and Schubert are master’s students at the Stanford Institute of Public Policy.

It continues to be a joy to research with undergraduates. Ryan Gibbs, Duke B.A. 2002, Omer Gokcekus, Duke Ph.D. 1994, and I published “Is Talk Cheap?” as the lead article in the December 2002 Journal of Policy Reform, and much to our delight our calculations of what it costs in campaign contributions to buy a word on your industry’s behalf in the Congressional Record was the subject of Richard Morin’s “Unconventional Wisdom” column in The Washington Post, April 13, 2003.

The Journal would like to thank donors to the Havrilesky Fund and Allen Starling Johnson, Jr. Endowment Fund as well as members of the staff of the Duke University Economics Department, especially Ryan Millner. He designed the layout and worked with all the journal’s authors to polish their contributions. We continue to be grateful for the ideas that Priscilla Lane introduced as editor of the journal from 1999 through 2002.

Ed Tower, DJE Faculty Advisor